The devil of Croyden Hill: kinship, fiction, fact, tradition

Folklore, April, 2005 by John B. Smith

Again, there are American variants. An authoritative synopsis of these runs: "A man decides to frighten another (or his son or servant). He dresses in a sheet; his pet monkey puts on a sheet and follows him. The person who is doing the scaring hears the victim say, 'Run Big 'Fraid, run; Little 'Fraid'll get you.' The scarer sees the monkey in the sheet and runs home" (Baughman 1966, 43; Aarne and Thompson 1973, 474). This synopsis does justice to the naturalistic American variants, in which the role originally played by a "real" ghost or devil is given to a pet monkey dressed in a sheet. Everything points to such jocular tales being a late development (Smith 1942, 89-94, but especially 93). Since, as such, they clearly represent only one quite recent strand of the tradition, it is surely appropriate to remark that the aforementioned synopsis needs to be rewritten with older, European, representatives of the tradition in mind. Some of these have already been discussed. If they could be added to, we would perhaps be in a position to solve one or other of the problems mentioned in this essay.

What we can say with reasonable certainty so far is that (B1), (B2) and (B4) are unreduced versions of AT 1676A, in which a person pretending to be a ghost and aiming to frighten another person himself falls prey to what he takes to be a "real" ghost. Although our stories labelled (C) show similarities with this pattern, an important difference is that (C1) and (C2) at least--of (C3), more anon--each has only two main characters: a person pretending to be an apparition and that person's intended victim. The first of these two characters is discomfited by the second, and not by a third party assumed by the first to be a "real" ghost/devil. The signs are that C is an independent tradition, perhaps restricted to the West Country.

Is there, however, a relevant tale-type that might help us test this assumption? There is. It is AT 1676, Joker Posing as Ghost Punished by Victim (Aarne and Thompson 1973, 474). On the face of it, this fits (C) perfectly. What of the content, though? In tales belonging to the type, there are two main characters. They are a plucky cobbler who takes up the challenge to mend shoes while keeping a corpse company overnight, and a joker who impersonates the corpse and, on showing signs of life in the middle of the night, receives a fatal blow on the head from the cobbler's hammer to the words: "If you're dead, you'd better lie down." [9]

No British examples of the tale-type appear to have reached a wider public, except in Katherine Briggs's indispensable and wide-ranging collection of British folk-tales. There, in her "Index of Tale Types and Migratory Legends," she has three (Briggs 1970-1, part B, xxx). [10] To begin with her second, it is our (B2), "The Netherbury Churchyard Legend." In fact, this is wrongly classified as AT 1676 rather than as 1675A, and the mistake is rectified later in her work (Briggs 1970-1, part B, vol. 2, 276). Her third example is a Wiltshire tale, "The Idiot," which does not fit easily into the AT 1676 category and has at least some similarity, as Briggs herself points out, with AT 1676A (Briggs 1970-1, part B, vol. 2, 240). [11] Briggs's first example remains to be examined (Briggs 1970-1, part B, vol. 1, 59-60). It is our (C3), "The Croydon [alias Croyden] Devil Claims His Own." Note, however, that the very title of this disqualifies it from membership of AT 1676, since the said Devil, hardly other than a gratuitous addition of Ruth Tongue's, is the third dramatis persona that would make the story into a representative, if of any type, then of AT 1676A. As will by now be clear, however, (C3) resists any such classification. It is most likely a transmogrification of (C1), which shows few signs of being a folk-tale unalloyed, and so cannot strictly speaking belong to any tale-type. If we do try and match it, it certainly shows little affinity with the representatives of AT 1676 or 1676A we have encountered earlier.